by J. L. Abramo
“I do love you, Aubrey, I do...you are my best friend ever. But with him it’s...different.”
Aubrey shoved the past outta his head and took deep breath. Pain whistled through his skull as though she’d punctured him with an icepick and he was leaking out of himself. Her expensive two-story adobe ranch-style house hid off an empty of back road and smelled of west Texas dust and cow shit, of the rotten eggs and struck matches of hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide from the oil refinery burn-off, of the same desperation and loneliness he’d smelled every moment of the quarter-century since Christine had walked out.
“You hear me? Three months ago.” The woman, a striking Latina beauty with sizzling dark hair and blazing dark eyes, shoved the harmonica closer to his face. “She’s been dead three months.”
“I heard you.”
“Her savior.” She snorted. “You ain’t nothing but another used up drunk.”
The pain in his nose now dull, Aubrey stood. Blood dotted his shirt. “Who are you?”
The woman’s eyes blazed. “Elena. Mariah’s best friend. The only one who loved her.”
“But I love you, Christine. He doesn’t...he’s a piece of shit. He’ll hurt you.”
“Mariah?”
“Christine. She changed her name when she got married the last time.”
“The last time?”
“Well, she’s dead now, ain’t she? Ain’t getting married again. Seven musta been her lucky number.”
Aubrey had just sat on the back stoop at Wylie’s, a bar on the wrong side of the tracks in Midland, his back against the cracked brick, his ass on the stained asphalt, when Elena’s letter had found him. Aubrey hadn’t wanted to get it, though he hadn’t known it—specifically—existed. He’d always known it—generally—would find him and when it did he wouldn’t want to read it.
“Where’d you get my harmonica?”
“Who do you think? A wino? Maybe some junkie dropped it off after Mariah died?” Elena glared “I got it from her. Just like these.”
She yanked a couple of black and white pictures from her hip pocket and for a moment, his heart soared. When he and Christine had been together, he’d spent hours taking black and whites; her running and laughing, her in the old claw foot bathtub in the place he rented, her naked and seductively splayed across his bed.
I love getting naked, she had said. I love being looked at.
Of all the pix he’d taken, and there had been hundreds, he only had one left. It was creased and sweat-stained, folded and refolded every night of every one of those years.
These new pix were different, though. She was heavier, older, the mileage obvious and painful in her face and body and in the sag of her breasts and the veins on her legs and the tracks on her arms; the setting a cheap apartment trying for sophistication. The picture in his pocket was sexy and playful where these were rote and mechanical. It was Christine but at twenty-five years removed...it was not Christine.
“He’s not good for you, Christine, he’s a user. He’ll hurt you. I can give you what you need.”
“Baby, you can’t give me anything except love.”
Elena snorted and nodded toward the pictures. “He took these.”
“I took some, too.”
“They all did. Every boyfriend...every husband. Larry, Laurence, took these. He took these and then he killed her and it was three goddamned months before you showed up. Wassa matter? Couldn’t get outta the bottle?”
“Huh? Killed?”
“Murdered.” Spittle, angry as the sandstorm outside, dotted his face, warm likes the blood from his nose. “He shot her in the face.” The woman pounded her open palm against her cheek. “He told her all the time...’You ugly...you stupid,’ then he shot her in the face.”
“Her last husband.”
Elena rolled her eyes. “Finally...lightning strikes. Yeah, dumbshit, her last husband. Larry. Laurence.”
Slowly, his hand shaking like an old man’s—and wasn’t he an old man now?—he took the harmonica. Maybe he expected it to be hot with the promise of love like when she bought it for him and he played for her. Or maybe he expected her hand to wrap around his while his wrapped around the harmonica like she had when she was naked and lusty.
Instead, it was hot with summer heat. And silent...one of the keys long since broken. Instead of seduction there was a gaping hole through him, the dust of memory beneath the crushing emptiness of life without her. It was the same instrument but like the pictures it had lost the magic she had imbued it with.
“Love’s not enough?”
“No. I’m sorry, Aubrey. I need adventure. I need excitement. It sounds stupid, I know, but I grew up out here in the dust and I want something different. We’re moving to Midland.”
“Bright lights, big city.”
“What?”
“Why take you so long? She always said send it to Wylie’s and you’d get it and you’d come for her.”
“I was...gone.”
Aubrey had been lost between Fort Hancock, Texas, and Los Lamentos, Mexico. Not even sure what he’d been looking for, but convinced, in his mescaline haze, that he could find it on the road between those towns. He’d wandered for six months, killing and eating rabbits, downing huge amounts of mescaline. In the end?
He hadn’t found shit.
“Said you’d come back for that fucking harmonica and rescue her. All those years and you never did.”
“Well, goddamnit, until this—” He shook the letter. “She never reached out to me.”
Elena’s eyes stabbed him. “Asshole, she reached out to you every night. Thought you’d hear her heart or some bullshit.”
“I never knew.”
“No shit. And when she finally wrote that fucking letter where were you?” Elena came in close, her breath hot and violent. “I know what happened. I know what that night cost you. She never stopped counting the pennies and nickels and dollar bills that left you empty.”
“No one knows what it cost me.”
“Christine? What happened?”
“Nothing, Aubrey, I’m fine.”
“Did he do this?”
“No, I tripped.”
“Bullshit. He did this...just like I told you he would.”
“No, Aubrey, it was my fault. He had to hit me, I didn’t give him any choice.”
“Whatever.” Elena glared at him. “It cost you the rest of your life and you been lost ever since. You saved her and lost yourself and now she’s dead and I wanna know what you’re going to do.”
He blinked against the sun pouring through the open window, against the dust blowing through the world, the physical pain forgotten in the spiritual pain of Christine’s death.
“What. You. Gonna. Do.”
“About what?”
“Larry. Laurence. You know how to find people, skip tracing and muscle for cheap gangstas. Go find him. Avenge Mariah.”
He shook his head. “But I don’t—”
“Settle your bill.”
“Huh?”
“Put paid to the debt you started paying twenty-five years ago.”
He stared at the harmonica, at the picture Larry had taken.
“Gotta kill yourself some Laurence. For her. For you. For me.”
“For you? What? You want it done then why haven’t you done it?”
She grinned, all teeth and acidic sweetness. “I’m not a killer.”
“Dammit, Christine, what did he do to you?”
They were Christine’s Teotihuacan.
Oil rigs, towering a hundred and fifty feet up, pipes clattering in the stand, the hum of the rotary drill twisting to get deeper, were elegant to her. The metallic clank and bang, the grease-stained platforms, the industrial stink, all seduced her. Christine’s mother had been to Teotihuacan in Mexico and had always spoken in reverent tones of the pyramids. Whenever Christine got drunk, a diet of whiskey and Oreos and thirteen donuts from the baker who gave her the dozen and a lagniappe, she would tell Aubrey her
mother’s stories of dancing with the dead along the Avenue of the Dead on Teotihuacan. Her mother had found the dead in the dry breezes and arid winds and pyramids, in the scent of the desert, and the dead were always Christine’s father, killed in an oil rig explosion near Marfa in 1969.
“Bobby do this? Again?”
“Aubrey, stop it! This is none of your business. This was my fault. I jumped on him first.”
“That’s shit and you know it. How many times are you going to let him do this to you?”
“Shut the hell up. You don’t know anything about it.”
“Yeah? Then why do you run to me every time it happens? Christine, please, lemme help. He’s going to kill you.”
Christine found her own dead, maybe her father and maybe her soul, in the dancing pipes stacked at the rigs’ monkey boards, waiting for derrick men to manipulate them and the drills to spin them into the ground searching that oil that became gasoline. Christine would tell her mother’s stories and then drive her and Aubrey until she found a rig in the desert. She’d dance, naked, in the dark just beyond the reach of the workers’ eyes, to the sound of pipe tripping and motors howling.
This was the cemetery where Christine’s mother and father were buried. Right now, the cemetery was sandwiched between two rigs. One worked, the din exactly what Christine loved. The other was shut down; empty of workers while long sections of pipe lay broken on the ground outside the bent and battered metal fence that kept the dead from escaping their kingdom.
“More than a beating this time, huh?”
“Aubrey, stop it.”
“He do that to your cheek? With an iron?”
“Aubrey, it’s fine. I shouldn’t have argued with him, I know better than that.”
“It’s never your fault, Christine.”
Aubrey found her grave quickly, the marker exactly where Elena had told him. Christine, Aubrey’s only love, was dead. Shot in the face by her most recent husband, a man Elena had called a pimp and panderer.
Laurence Petit.
Who immediately fled but who, according to a couple of quick phone calls Aubrey had made this morning, was in Odessa, about twenty miles west of Midland. An electricity account, a sewer and water account, a job in a cheap bar all bright and clear on his credit report. The bar was bullshit. If he was a pimp, then the bar was a cover job to sell his women.
Christine’s marker was simple; no name, just a cross. She was next to her parents and when he and Christine had been together, that plot of land, a few feet wide and a few more feet taller, had been the one constant. She had kept it clean. She had prayed at their feet more often than not, and found a calm in the midst of her chaotic soul.
The harmonica was stiff in Aubrey’s pocket. Christine had kept it all these many years, since the bloody night she’d left him, unable to face him anymore. He had never forgotten the harmonica or stopped wondering where it had ended up. Through all the boyfriends and pimps, through the husbands and abusers, through the convicts taking whatever money she managed to hoard, she’d managed to keep this broken harmonica safe.
And believe that someday it would lead him back to her.
“I’m sorry, babe. I should have been there.”
Bullshit. It wasn’t that he should have been there, it was that he should never have left. Spilled whiskey, he thought. Broken cookies. No use crying. We loved how we loved. I did what she secretly wanted but couldn’t ask, and she couldn’t bear to know it.
So she had left, had hooked up with someone as bad for her as Bobby Trimble had been and standing here now, trying to feel her through the ground over her, Aubrey wondered if they all had become Bobby Trimble for her like they did for him. Every face he saw in a bar or on the street or in a cell with him, was Bobby Trimble. In all his dreams and nightmares, in every single goddamned shot of whiskey he’d knocked back. In every poem he wrote in his head but refused to commit to paper, in every song he wrote in his heart but refused to lay across his guitar.
“I didn’t know who else to call.”
“You did fine, Linda. I’m glad you called me.”
“Aubrey, it was awful. There was so much blood. Is she going to die? I called the ambulance but then...I couldn’t stay...they would have asked me stuff and...Aubrey, I’m so sorry, I cain’t afford no other arrest.”
“Linda, hush, you did good. Thank you for letting me know. I’m sure she’ll be okay.”
“She still loves you. She told me so.”
“Yeah? Then she should come with me.”
Aubrey could almost smell her lavender scent, almost hear her laugh in the breeze. He hadn’t known any of the other bastards she’d filled her life with since Bobby Trimble. She’d slipped away and except for the occasional word from a mutual friend, he heard nothing.
Now she was dead.
All the bastards had become the first and now Larry...Laurence...was the last.
And Aubrey would kill him just as he had killed Bobby Trimble.
The bar was on Nuevo Street, the street itself a dive that ran for miles, populated by bars and head shops, by tattoo parlors, by a battered and bruised police substation next door to a Salvation Army kitchen, by resale shops and mom and pop groceries offering nothing but scratch-off tickets. People with worn-out bodies were scattered afterthoughts all over the street, between broken buildings, under cars and in alleyways; clusters of cancer eating away at the body human.
Aubrey, his head banging, his hands shaking, his heart as resolute as the weakest coward, stood in a parking lot. A few cars, a handful of trucks, broken bottles, used condoms and syringes. On the far side, he saw a ’14 Expedition with tinted windows and wheels that spun when the tires turned. The plate was the same as his friend at Midland PD had given him.
So Larry Petit...Laurence...was here.
Which meant so was Bobby Trimble.
“I thought he was going to kill me, Aubrey.”
“I know, baby. Don’t talk right now.”
“I’m scared. I tried to leave him but—”
“Shhhh...”
“Aubrey...he—”
“What, Christine? What did he do?”
“He...raped me. He beat me and he raped me. I’m so scared. He’s never going to let me go.”
“Yeah, he will. I promise you that.”
Everything since Bobby Trimble had been shit; bottles and cheap women, fights and skip tracing for low-rent bondsmen up and down west Texas. Everything since had been self-recrimination and attempts to beat the memory out of him, or to drown it out, or even burn it out the night he set himself on fire while cooking meth.
Inside, this bar was the same as every other one he’d been in for twenty-five years. The same stink of piss and blood and stale booze and vomit and hopelessness and who gives a shit about redemption anyway. The same dull neon beer signs that offered little or no light and the same groan of tired country and seventies arena rock.
“I can save you, Christine.”
“No one can save me. My soul is lost.”
“I can save you. I will save you.”
“What are you going to do? What kind of savior are you?”
“Get’cha something?” She was a dirty blonde, her breasts tired, her eyes empty. She smelled of big box store discount perfume and cheap soap beneath that. Her hands were scarred and her skin gone leather.
“Looking for Larry. Owe him a few bucks.” Aubrey winked conspiratorially. “Heard I could catch him here.”
“Who?”
“Larry? Runs the ponies?”
Her face clouded and he knew that look. For a second, she’d thought he was something different, but he opened his mouth and she decided he was exactly like everyone else who came into this place. The truth was, Aubrey felt like everyone else. Sometimes, in the midst of a bad night, in the midst of a fisticuffs or two, Aubrey knew he’d spent too many years in shitty bars with bodily fluids as the decorating motif, too many nights between buildings with blood leaking from his head or spitting tee
th.
He could blame Bobby Trimble all he wanted but at some point, didn’t he have to be a man? At some point, didn’t he have to stand up and be who he was supposed to be? Who the Lord above wanted him to be? Or was this it? Dissolute in a bar, hungry for the next craptacular job that would replenish his stash of whiskey and fast food burgers and seeing Bobby Trimble in every face?
“Ponies, huh? You a rider, cowboy?”
“Hard to say.”
She frowned. “You owe him or not?”
“Yeah.”
Aubrey could see the caution in her face. “Well, I don’t know no Larry. Might check the backroom, all kinds’a shit back there.” She nodded toward a doorway behind the bar.
Silently, Aubrey slipped a ten in her apron as she headed for a trio of rig workers playing their hard hats like drums.
The hallway was short and narrow and as dingy as he’d expected. Dirty bathrooms were on one side and a cubby-hole kitchen, probably shellacked in grease, on the other. A back door was closed and a lock bar thrown across it, an EXIT sign half lit above it. Just before that door, there was another. Aubrey checked the .45 in his pocket and went in without knocking, banging the door against the wall.
“The fuck’re you?” A man sat behind a desk, face startled at the intrusion. A pile of brunette hair never stopped bobbing in his lap. “Get the fuck outta here, I’m busy.”
“Be careful of those teeth, boy, cut you up.”
The man grinned. “No teeth. Like my women best with no teeth.”
Aubrey tapped the door. “We got business. The beezer can wait.”
The man laughed but pulled the woman off his cock. “A good blow will never wait, but I get what you’re saying.” The woman stood, wiped her lips, kept her eyes well away from Aubrey. The man patted her ass. “Keep that mouth wet, honey, and them lips warm. Get your ass back in here the second this dude leaves.”
She must not have answered quickly enough or submissively enough. His hand flashed out quick as a blade, landed hard against the side of her head.